The advent of the Internet and other networks has rapidly caused a migration of many everyday tasks from the physical world to the digital world. For example, communications that would in years past have been memorialized on paper and sent via a mail carrier are now typed electronically and transmitted digitally over a network to the recipient almost instantly. The physical exchange of money during transactions is becoming less frequent, and the virtual electronic exchange of funds over networks has become much more prevalent. Indeed, the execution of transactions can now take place entirely online, such as over the Internet. All in all, many activities that used to require physical presence and physical interaction can now take place over a network between remote parties who would otherwise be unable to effectively communicate.
With the coming of the digital age, the one activity that has not migrated strongly from the physical world to the digital one has been the group interaction. While there exist a number of mechanisms and forums for digital communication between remote parties, none of these has provided a compelling solution that can lead to widespread use and growth. The existing communications mechanisms all fail in a number of regards to provide a true online group experience. For example, no such technologies provide a true group space within which the group members may explore and experience with each other through a wide range of activities. Rather, many existing technologies tend to focus on a single activity or endeavor, such as gaming or file sharing, rather than on the group and its activities and communication. Other technologies allow group chatting, but have no true sense of groups, requiring setup of the group each time a group chat is attempted, and providing no mechanism for transitioning the group to an activity other than pure chatting without again manually setting the group up at the next activity.
While many chatting programs allow contacts to be grouped into “buddy lists,” this set of contacts does not necessarily know of each other's existence nor do they necessarily share activities with each other. In other words, the only sense of community is unilaterally imposed by one user onto his or her contacts. Furthermore, this grouping of contacts is a mere listing and does not facilitate group activities or interaction, further impeding the development of a sense of community.
In short, existing online interaction mechanisms do not provide a mechanism for fostering or accessing an intimate persistent relationship within a small select group of users. Moreover, the lack of group mobility provided by existing mechanisms further serves to distinguish such systems from real-world physical relationships, and thus further serves to isolate the user hoping for significant online interaction.
There thus remains a need for an online group communication application through which an intimate group of users can interact with each other in any number of ways, and through which users can access, nurture, and develop their shared relationships with one another. Such a system would finally provide the Internet generation with the online social connection and shared relationships that they now lack.